


Between Two Thieves

by Walutahanga



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alliances, Canon Divergence - Star Wars Expanded Universe, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Expanded Universe, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jensaarai, Loss, Survivor Guilt, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-23 18:30:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9670847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walutahanga/pseuds/Walutahanga
Summary: After Snoke's massacre at the Jedi School, Luke receives a visitor and an offer.It changes everything and nothing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was based on two ideas: 
> 
> First, all those Force Orders from the old EU. The ones that Luke kept tripping over and making friends with, because he was just a little ball of sunshine and religious tolerance. What if they're alive and well in the new canon, and what would they make of Snoke's attack on the school? 
> 
> Second, what are the chances of every single student being in attendance the day of the attack? You're telling me no one was playing hookie or visiting family, or just happened to be a really good sprinter? It took Palpatine twenty years to track down all the original Jedi even after catching them completely off-guard.

After the tragedy at the Jedi School, Luke Skywalker secluded himself. His sister Organa has made a few clipped statements to the press, but the Jedi Master is not available for comment.

This is all explained to Saarai-Kaar by an anxious government aide who repeats himself three times, as if saying it anew will change her mind.

“With all due respect, I don’t think you understand. A Grand Admiral could request a meeting with Luke Skywalker and wouldn’t get it right now.”

“He will see me,” Saarai-Kaar says firmly.

“But –”

“Send the message. I will await his response.” She turns off the holo before the edgy little man can keep arguing. Perhaps her armour would have made these paper-pushers take her more seriously. They might not understand the precise significance, but they have an instinct for formality and ceremony, as if the form of something is more important than the substance.

It’s a passing whim though. Her people only survived this long because of their secrecy. She'd said said as much when Skywalker invited them into the light all those years ago and the recent tragedy has only emphasised her point. She would only wear her armour these days if she were going into battle, or initiating a new student.

It is half an hour before the aide calls her back. He is, if anything, even more flustered.

“Your appointment has been approved,” he says. “I am sending you the address now.”

“Acknowledged,” Saarai-Kaar says, and does not bother to thank him. His ‘help’ had wasted an hour of her time.

The address is a short flight away on a discrete set of office-buildings. At least the guards that meet her on the landing platform seem halfway competent. There are three snipers openly aiming at her when the Captain politely requests to see the colour of her lightsabre, and two more they think she can't see. No one relaxes until they see the neutral white glow of her sabre, which she mentally notes for when she gets home. She never disdains new ideas on security precautions, regardless of source.

After her sabre has been switched off and restored to her belt she is escorted deferentially inside to where a short, dark-haired woman waits.

“Organa,” Saarai-Kaar greets her.

“Saarai-Kaar,” Organa replies. Her voice is hoarse, as if she had spent the past few days weeping or screaming. Neither would be surprising. Organa’s son had been on the list of casualties. “This is a surprise.”

“There are matters to discuss. Given recent events.”

Organa doesn’t flinch, but Saarai-Kaar feels the ripple of pain through the Force and regrets it. She understand only too well the loss of a child.

“Are you here to gloat?” Organa asks. 

“Why would I do that?” Saarai-Kaar says, genuinely surprised.

“You warned Luke, again and again of the dangers of making the Academy public. You called him ten kinds of fool. And now the Academy lies in ruins, and you are here, proven correct.” Organa glares, fierce protectiveness blazing through the Force in a way that's not quite anger, but nearly as dangerous.

“I am not here for that.” 

“Then why are you here?”

Saarai-Kaar folds her arms, uncomfortable with the almost-unknown position of having to explain herself. She is no good with words; has never needed them. Her sabre had been enough to drive off the Inquisitors and Imperial lackeys that came sniffing round during Palpatine's reign, her sheer strength of personality enough to hold her people together during the Clone Wars and the darker times after. It is only now, in the twilight of her life, she is called upon to practise the very skills she'd once scorned.

"I have been where he stands now," she says after considering and discarding several answers. "It is a very dark place to stand alone."

"I wasn't aware the Jensaarai were on such good terms with the Jedi. Especially considering it was the Jedi that nearly wiped you out once."

"The old Jedi. Not the new."

Organa searches her gaze warily and whatever she sees must convince her, because that fierce protectiveness fades. “He has not spoken to anyone since it happened,” she says, and this time Saarai-Kaar _does_ wince at the pain washing off the other woman, that raw-red agony and bitter-yellow helplessness. “I have droids watching over him. I’m afraid that he will...”

She doesn’t finish, but Saarai-Kaar understands.

“Let me talk to him.”

* * *

Skywalker sits alone in the dark. The room echoes with poisonous emotions; grief, guilt, self-loathing. It is such a vast difference to Skywalker's normal peaceful aura that even Saarai-Kaar pauses in the doorway, unsettled. Small wonder Organa is afraid for her brother. He feels only one small step from throwing himself out that window. 

“Saarai-Kaar,” he acknowledges her quietly without looking up. 

“Master Skywalker,” she replies. She considers taking the cushion opposite him, but her knees won’t manage such a position for long. “You, droid.” She addresses the R2 unit in the corner that whistles in response. “Go find me a chair. My legs are too old to fiddle around with these meditation positions.”

The droid’s sensor rolls to look at Skywalker, warbling worriedly

“I’ll stay with him,” Saarai-Kaar snaps. “And the faster you go, the faster you’ll come back.”

She’s glad when it departs with a huffy bleep. She’s never been comfortable with droids, doesn’t like the potential for subversion and spyware. She’s never allowed one on her training grounds.

Skywalker hasn’t moved or looked at her. He remains staring at the wall. He’s a young man compared to her, a warrior in the prime of his life, and yet in this moment he looks as old as the hills. 

“You were right,” he says softly.

“About what?”

“About everything. I was too arrogant, too impatient. I should never have built the school.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Skywalker. It does neither of us any credit.” She does not soften her tone. Skywalker will have had gentleness from his sister and friends. What he needs now is unvarnished truth. “I said you should have kept it secret, not trumpet its existence for all the galaxy to hear – and yes, perhaps that is on you. If Snoke had not heard of it, perhaps he would never have come. But it is also possible he would have heard of it regardless. There is no meat on that hook so don’t bother swallowing it.”

Skywalker still won't look at her, and she wonders with a chill if this has finally broken the man. 

She'd always found his incurable optimism one of his most irritating traits, but it's also the reason she trusts him. The Jedi Masters of old would never have helped Dathomir with their Nightsister problem, or arranged a new home for the Fallenassi when their old one was taken by the First Order, or spent six months tracking down the Aiing Ti on the Outer Rim just for a philosophical conversation. On the bitter days when the memory of a bloody battlefield threatens to overwhelm her, she can recall Skywalker's compassion and be reassured that - whatever weapon he carries and whatever clothing he wears - at heart his kind are really nothing at all like their predecessors. 

Without that faith, will he turn inward like the old Jedi? Become hard and distrusting and blind to beauty? 

No. She won't allow it. Not only because of what that would mean for the Jensaarai, but because she refuses to let Snoke and his child-killers destroy something else. 

“Were there any survivors?” She asks. 

Skywalker shakes his head, gaze still fixed on some distant point. “Barely anyone.”

“Then some _did_ survive. Who?”

He sighs tiredly. “Leave me to my grief, Saarai-Kaar.”

Her eyes narrow. 

“You think you are the only one to have lost their world? I lost my master, my husband and my friends to the old Jedi. I lost my son to the Sith. I have lost and I have lived on, for life _does not stop_ for grief. Now who survived?” 

Finally she seems to have gotten through to him. He is at least looking at her, blue eyes faded and lost, but finally seeing her. 

“Some of the older students,” he says slowly. “Zekk, Raynor, Lowbacca and the Durron boys. They took the speeder again to go cliff-diving and were away when…” His expression crumples for a moment. “The chironian girl, Lusa, was there but escaped. She carried one of the other younglings with her.”

“Smart girl.” No learner could have matched the Knights in power, but no humanoid could match a chironian for speed. It still would have been an impossible choice between who to save and who to leave behind to die. “Who else?”

“Eryl was off-world visiting her father. Her friend Lyric was invited along.” 

Skywalker stops and Saarai-Kaar prompts him: “Is that is all?”

“That is all.”

“And what of the graduates? The teachers? I know there were a few.” Historians and healers for the most part; Skywalker’s egalitarian approach would have shocked his predecessors.

“Dead.”

Finally Saarai-Kaar feels surprise. “All of them? Even the Firrerreo?” If anyone survived the slaughter, she’d thought it would be the female healer that Skywalker had found somewhere on the Outer Rim. The woman had only been a passable sparring partner by Jensaarai standards, but she’d had the bitter practicality of a survivor that would have put her in better stead than the idealists and dreamy-eyed hopefuls Skywalker tended to attract.

“Yes.” Skywalker smiles bitterly, in a way that suggests he knows what Saarai-Kaar is thinking. “I bet Corran is glad he rejected my offer now.”

Saarai-Kaar elects to ignore that particular bit of self-pity.  

“So you still have students,” she says, focusing on the facts. “You have the seeds to begin anew.”

“There will be no more Jedi.”

“Don’t be apathetic. You will rebuild your people as we did. In secret.” The droid returns, pushing a chair before him. She sits, back straight, hands flat on her knees in the formal manner of address. “I bring two messages. One is from Queen Mother Djo of Hapes, granting you the use of an obscure moon for the building of a new school. The First Order is unlikely to look there; Hapes has always been neutral ground, and Ta'a Chume's dislike of the Force was infamous.”

He starts to shake his head. “It’s too much of a risk –”

“Which is what the second message is about. For so long as you need it, Matukai and Jensaarai warriors will defend your school.”

Finally he stops trying to interrupt her to stare at her in disbelief. As well he might; the offer she outlines is a shockingly unprecedented move. 

“The Fallenassi will lend illusionists for concealment. Dathomir has promised one witch from every light-sided clan. Killia has agreed to assign five Rangers, and the Aiing Tii will allot you a pilot and ship to make supply runs. These roles will be indefinite, until such times as the Jedi have sufficient defences of their own or choose to go public again, with the understanding that the favour will be returned if any of us are ever in similar need.”

Skywalker looks as if she had hit him with a training stick.

“You're offering help?” He says.

“Yes.” Saarai-Kaar grimaces and rolls her eyes. “Except for the Zeison-Sha, but that’s hardly surprising.”

“But you've always wanted as little to do with Jedi as possible. You wouldn't even exchange students with us before." 

“To be fair, we’ve never wanted anything to do with each other either. It was Maz who called us and made the suggestion. She was…very eloquent.”

Which is one way of putting it. The diminutive bartender is one of the few beings in the galaxy who could demand an audience with the various Force traditions and get it. She’s one of even fewer who could browbeat them with the cornerstones of their own philosophies until they agreed to do what she wanted.

Luke huffs a small laugh. “I shouldn’t be surprised. What did she say?”

“That the worst crime we ever did ourselves was let us be divided. The Empire did not stop with the old Jedi, and the First Order will not stop with you. If we do not stand together now, there is no telling who will be next.”

“And you agreed?”

There are many answers she could give. She says simply: “I am tired of seeing children die for religion.”

Skywalker turns away, hand across his eyes, and she does him the kindness of looking away so she doesn’t see him weep.

“I thank you for your offer,” he says finally. “I am humbled and gratified by your generosity… but I cannot accept it. My teaching days are over. I will train no more Jedi. Yoda named me the last, and the last I will be.”

She shakes her head. “You speak in your grief.”

“I speak truth. I have failed in ways you _cannot_ imagine. Either the teachings were always flawed, or I am. Either way, I will inflict no more Jedi upon the galalxy.”

There is an unfamiliar, hard edge to his voice. Saarai-Kaar feels as if some vast distance has opened between them, her arguments falling futilely into empty space. She wishes she were a Jal-Shay to weave power with words and draw him back to the here and now.

“You will just abandon your students then?” She says, hoping cruelty will spur him where practicality had not.  

He shrugs, unaffected. “Take them. Make them Jensaarai or Matukai or Fallanassi, or whatever else they can be. I won’t make them Jedi.”

There is no point talking to him now, she realises. He is deep in the grip of his pain and won’t let go for sometime. She will try again later, when he is in a clearer frame of mind.

“I’ll take them,” she concedes. “But only until you are ready to take them back.”

And if she must drag him back by his ear, she will. Maz is right; none of them can afford to stand alone right now.

He nods wearily. “Thank you Saarai-Kaar.”

She stands. “I will leave you now. Use this time well, Skywalker. Mourn. Rage. For when it is over, there is work to be done.”

* * *

But when Saarai-Kaar returns the next day, Skywalker is gone. Organa is frantic. Her brother has done exactly what she feared; something reckless. Whether he intends to die or to lose himself in the vastness of space, Saarai-Kaar doubts they’ll ever see him again. He left behind only the Astromech droid that has shut itself down.

Saarai-Kaar finds herself deeply disappointed in Skywalker. Perhaps he is not so different to the Jedi Order of old. Like them, he turned out to be brittle and breakable. And when darkness fell he too ran, leaving others to take up his burdens. 

* * *

Saarai-Kaar wears her armour when Organa takes her to meet the surviving students. It is a risk, wearing it on Coruscant, but a calculated one. In this instance, the weight of tradition outweighs a comparatively small danger.

They are a sorry-looking lot, ranging from a youngling barely taller than her knee to the adolescent wookie that towers over her. They’re clean and freshly clothed, but there are bacta patches on burn wounds and hair still scorched where a blow came dangerously close to decapitation. A human boy about eight or nine years old is gingerly touching a bandage covering his left eye. Beside him, a young man seems to be trying to reassemble a working lightsabre, or possibly cobble together the remains of several.

They all look up, tensing as she and Organa arrive.

“This is Saarai-Kaar,” Organa says. “She is here to talk to you about your training.”

“I thought you said Master Luke left,” says the youth with the broken lightsabre. His belligerence is a thin skin over aching loss.

“He did.”

“So how’s she going to teach us how to be Jedi?” There’s a little sneer in the way he looks Saarai-Kaar up and down, seeing only an old woman in foreign armour.

“I’m afraid that path is closed,” Saarai-Kaar says. “With all the graduates dead, Skywalker is once again the last of his kind. You will never become Jedi.”

She sees the youth absorb that knowledge, swallow it down and press on. It’s an admirable display of emotional control.

“What do you want then?” He says.

She tilts her head thoughtfully. “What’s your name?”

He eyes her warily. “…Kyp,” he replies after a moment.

“Kyp what?”

“Kyp Durron.”

“Well, Kyp.” Using the Force, she lifts the half-assembled lightsabre from the floor and floats it to her. She checks that he’s made the right adjustments and isn’t in danger of overloading the power cell. It’s good work, if a little crude. He stares at her, wide-eyed as she offers it back to him. “I’m here to discuss a different path.”

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone wondering, Saarai-Kaar is a canon character, the semi-founder and master of the Jensaarai Order introduced in the old!EU book "I, Jedi". They have a complicated history, being a Jedi offshoot from the Clone Wars that absorbed some Sith teachings. This went badly for them whenever they encountered pure Sith or Jedi, so by the time Luke met them they weren't exactly enamored of either side. 
> 
> (Luke being Luke, they're pretty solid allies with the New Jedi within a few years, because apparently no one can resist that face). 
> 
> Until proven otherwise, I just assume that the new!canon is a divergence of the old!EU. Prince Isolder is still around and still marries Teneniel Djo, but they never meet Leia, so Hapes never joins the New Republic. Corran Horn still rejects Jedi training, but never gets to change his mind because of the massacre. Other Force traditions are still around, but due to the First Order being more effective than the Empire, few get up the courage to go public. 
> 
> The title is from Fulton Oursler: "Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.” It seemed appropriate, as from Saarai-Kaar's point of view Luke is letting himself be paralysed by the past to the expense of the future. She, of course, doesn't know the full extent of the tragedy or Ben Solo's role in it.
> 
> Apologies as well for how harsh Saarai-Kaar is on Luke and Jedi in general. Bear in mind, she's biased by her past and she's not in possession of all the facts.


End file.
